Thanks again for having me on CBC!

Because so many people overpaid for homes even while loan rates were low, I believe there will be a housing catastrophe because these people are in debt. If housing costs continue to drop and, for whatever reason, they can no longer afford the property and it goes into foreclosure, they have no equity since, even if they try to sell, they will not make any money. I believe that many individuals will experience this, especially given the impending mass layoffs and rapidly rising living expenses.

Literally all of these problems are caused by zoning and permitting rules. Building the same, repetitive building is infinitely better than having people sleep on the streets. If zoning and permitting were cheaper and faster, people would have more money to build unique buildings in the first place.

Growing up, my mom called our house a “Vancouver special “ I really thought she was lying and just wanted us to feel unique… haha she was right…

I love how urban planning is becoming something people actually care about Follow “About Here” for more videos from Uytae lee

The Vancouver special is so iconic. Thanks for giving us some context for it's place in our history!

Thank you for making another one of Uytae's great videos public for people outside of Canada!

Why doesn't Vancouver host a competition for a dozen templates of "Vancouver Specials" so that they don't look all the same but adhere to the same specifications (lot size, square footage, and levels, etc)? I believe this will stifle most critics and provide quick housing to newcomers.

In order to buy cheaply, I'm waiting for a housing crisis after selling a few houses in 2020. I've been considering buying stocks as a fallback. Do you have any advice on when is the greatest time to make a purchase? On one hand, I continue to see and read about traders making more than $$$k per week. On the other hand, I constantly hear that the market is crazy and in the midst of a dead cat bounce. What causes this?

Can't wait to see what the next special has in store for us.

Since moving to Canada, I’ve lived in basement suites. It’s not a fun experience. There’s almost always pressure to use less utilities. I had one landlord frequently go into my kitchen although he lived upstairs to make sure everything was tidy. One landlord tried to hike my rent by 300 dollars because she mistakenly believed another person had moved in with me. None of these antics are legal but usually the upstairs landlord is too amaturish to know this. There’s also a general sense of being watched. It could be that my experience is particular but I think renters perspectives are almost always missing from these kinds of think pieces.

American style zoning is a major reason why housing is so expensive, yet at the same time, amenities and services are so far away from everyone's home. But it also ensure property value to increase overtime (by limiting the supply) so many home owners don't want it to be changed.

Whomever this young man was giving this narration, well done! I've rarely heard a presentation given with such clarity and precise inflection. Also, whomever wrote this presentation did a great job!

Having multiple options of quick approval housing would increase the longevity of the designs. More options also allow for different sizes of builds, especially important for infill that is a net gain for income for the city. More upfront work, and more payoff in the future.

Uytae's content is one of the best in my urban design, housing binge. It's so informative with great storytelling! Also CBC Vancouver has been uploading some great stories.

you have to do a a "part 2". Punjabi people from Vancouver's Eastside near Ross street moved to Surrey in late 1980s. The doubled the size of the Vancouver Special and it became the Surrey Mega House. if you look close enough you can see the Vancouver Special in the design. Tons of great examples of this behind the Guru Nanak Sikh Temple in Surrey

Great video! For 2023, it’s hard to nail down specific predictions for the housing market is because it’s not yet clear how quickly or how much the Federal Reserve can bring down inflation and borrowing costs without tanking buyer demand for everything from homes to cars.

One of the interesting twists on the history of Special has been the surge in popularity of 'mid-century design', and the ability of this very simple form to work with that aesthetic. Some judicious application of quality cladding materials, and better windows and landscaping, have transformed many of these ugly ducklings into homes that are now seen as attractive by many. A video on some of the best transformations would be fun to see.

As always, excellent work Uytae.

My house just made it into this vid lol

So well produced! I’m definitely keen for a new Vancouver special!

Please keep these coming CBC Vancouver! Excellent series

I love your videos, they are so informative and always gives us another view point on subjects we often are 'tunnel visioned' about. Thank you for the Vancouver Special - the comedy here is if you are lucky enough to own a VS you are sitting on a goldmine, not because the structure is worth anything more than nostalgia, but because the land value is astronomically valued. Unfortunately Michelle Yu is in the process of purchasing as many VS's as possible as Land Assembly which in turn is causing another housing issue.

A very well done article, quite entertainment and very informative. Keep up the great work.

The answer to the "too many and too bland" problem is so blindingly simple that it actually has me fear for society since it's not being talked about (not even by Uytae) ...Have more the one "Special"... that's it. Let the builder/homeowner choose which model of "Special" to go with that meets their needs.

This journalist is a brilliant presenter. I don't watch TV and have never seen him before. Super informative, easy to understand, excellent graphics.

This is quality CBC content, nice to see for a change.

Good to see Uytae back at talking about housing and urban planning in the Vancouver. building more of the “missing middle” fast and affordable can be a good thing for Vancouver

Thank you for putting this video together! Informative and inspiring!

Incredibly informative and well made! Keep it up with more consumer and market related informational videos!

Love Uytae's series! keep 'em coming

This randomly popped up in my feed, and I'm glad it did. Excellent video. Uytae is very good. Wow, I can't believe I just watched 9 minutes about housing and it was awesome! Cheers

This kid is the best at explaining so much in our city and how it was shaped

You knocked it out of the park so far you hit one of the Vancouver specials across the street! This is truly an excellent piece!

The priority should be getting people in homes, not maximizing property value or community character - those come second. The homeless population of North America has exploded over the last 20 years and somehow NIMBYs and city councils have not gotten the memo...

It's quite enlightening and these special houses meet a great purpose and roomy too.

Amazing content and quality of reporting, research, production and editing! 10/10

Legit good production from CBC. The people who created this should be proud.

Thank you for the educational video. I have watched some of your videos and I find them very helpful to understand the area where I live in. 👏

I’ve had questions around the history of Vancouver specials for so long!! Great video

This is something that hits home for me. Great job Uytae!!

Can we just get rid of front yards and build in them? The building set back rules waste so much space and no one even uses their front yard

Very informative and interesting ! Thanks

Liking these series from Uytae Lee

Uytae you are so informative and comprehensive. Hope you will get your own channel one day.

The best content cbc is making right now!

That was wonderful. Thank you 🙏🏼

The Kelowna Quad is so cute! Would be great for Vancouver to allow the purchase of neighbouring Vancouver Specials to be turned into the mutual-driveway developments that are so popular in the States. If we abandoned the super antiquated alley style and instead used that as buildable land, we'd be able to get even more units in the same amount of land.

Love it!!! Awesome job👏👏

I grew up in a new subdivision in White Rock in the 1960s and there were six house designs. They would flip the design - a left side door or a right side door. They would change the roof design - about four different ones. And they didn't allow the same design within three houses of each other. The houses looked OK, and it was interersting when you went into a house and realized that it was 'your house' but in reverse. :) My mother-in-law had a Vancouver Special - a nice little house with lots more space than you would expect. :)

Great choice in video Uytae! and golden information for general public

Thank you. These videos are important for people to understand the housing crisis. Builders, foreigners, realtors, investors, homeowners, renters, etc.. are not the problem. We need to address zoning and permitting reform badly and get rid of these neighbourhood special interest groups who are selfishly preventing development.

Loved the way you presented the story !

Thank you for the investigation andfor sharing 👍🏽

God bless the Vancouver special!

My friend rents in a home in Calgary that is similar to the Vancouver special. It was retrofitted to have 4 apartment units in it, 2 on the top and 2 on the bottom. It’s a really nice apartment & it would be interesting to see more houses like that be converted to apartments with 1-2 bedroom suites in it.

love your content Uytae!

Thanks for creating higher quality content than I have the attention span to :)

Wow! Very informative!

Heh heh, before the video started I saw the thumbnail about ‘housing’ and thought, “ Hey! This must be filmed in Vancouver, “cause that’s not just a house… that’s a “Vancouver special”! Nostalgic for me because I used to live in YVR and miss it so much. Vangroovy will always be home!

Great short documentary. Coquitlam also has pre-approved triplex and fourplex plans but the approved neighbourhoods remain limited. Another problem to highlight is financing for new middle-housing construction. Right now, middle-housing construction stalls during high-interest periods. Pent up demand accumulates, and when the buyers finally return, there is little supply to satisfy the demand thus causing prices to rise over a short period. We need a financing mechanism that encourages a steady supply of middle-housing irrespective of interest rates. Otherwise, we will repeat price spikes like 2015-2017 and 2020-2022 again and again.

Your comments about the vancouver special sparked memories. What we,they.,need to do now is to multiply that by atleast 4×.

I love Vancouver specials, I lived in 2 of them, would love to own another one!

He really is an amazing storyteller I watch everything this guy produces I mean of course I’m bias coming from Vancouver, great videos so informative so well put together.

Incredible video for the have nots, thank you.

All my brothers and sisters are all living in each Vancouver special houses 😊

been waiting decades for someone to formally storytell this 😊

Awesome video. Thanks!

I think that east van co-op design should become the new Vancouver Special! ❤

love this!!!!

Tear down a $1.6mil 5/6 bed 4 bath 50+ year old vancouver special with a 30'/33' wide lot, build a duplex, and you'll probably end up with two duplexes each having a 3 bedroom 2.5 bathroom selling for $1.9mil each (combined total of $3.8million). tearing them all down, combining the land, and building row houses does the same thing (plenty of examples on the king edward ave corridor). Another thing is plenty of strata units are selling below assessed price and below asking price in the current market. So by preserving the Vancouver Special and extending the service life of the structure is the affordable way to go. If you want a quadplex or buildings with lots of units, the west side has plenty of much lots with larger footprints suitable for it.

Great video. Well narrated

The Vancouver Specials look so cool. A simple renovation would make them very nice!

Housing really is something in Vancouver, I'm fortunate to be a house owner and have that one taken care of. I've watched it take 6 years to plan and build 2-6 story buildings nearby where I live in East Vancouver, I think a total of a couple of hundred units. With 500 thousand new immigrants coming into Canada each year it's easy to see that building at that pace will create all kinds of problems. And it will be a huge bottle neck with no easy solution unless there is some kind of drastic change to how long it takes to build. So for the past few years the city of Vancouver have been working on their city wide plan. Years in the making and still not finished, then years after that before anything gets built and occupied. In the meantime another 500k new people coming in each year ( I realise many are already here as students etc.. but it's still 500k arriving at some point in time). Anyone who takes 10 minutes to think it through can see how ridiculous it all is. It will have taken the city almost a whole generation to make a plan and actually build some buildings that will only be playing catch up anyway. I feel for immigrants who are coming to Canada thinking it's a great life here.

I remember seeing some of the new (~2005 - 2010) suburb developments in Calgary and Edmonton where it was quite obviously a handful of build plans repeated throughout the neighbourhood. Some of the older neighbourhoods had more structural variety, but still used the same design aesthetic. Sometimes there was variety in the paint colours and finishing trim, but often they all used the same limited pallette. I'm sure after ~10 years there will at least be more colour variety as they are repainted (though working as a house painter for a few years, there was not a lot of variety in the colours we used the majority of the time). Time will probably improve the sterile and empty feeling of those newer neighbourhoods as they are repainted and trees and gardens grow, but better mixed density and mixed use development would make them so much better.

Great piece of content.

This is great. I love the "Vancouver Special". How do we manage to let the bureaucrats of city planning department get in a way?

The Toronto Special that was built across the first ring of Toronto suburbs is a six-plex. We also have a long history of worker's housing buildings during the workers' rights era, a lot of which didn't survive the renewal era of demolitions. Dense housing is good housing and makes cities what they are.

Another great video Lee! I well remember participating in the distaste for the Vancouver Special. People like a good pile-on, don't they? And then later they realize their critique was one-sided, and really just another instance of mob mentality.

Good job hosting hope to see you in more.

As Ukrainian immigrant I’d rather spent my childhood in Vancouver Special than in depressed Brezhnevka building with fackud up balconies, small rooms and ugly facades. Appreciate what you have.

Do you know which building type is very beloved today but was hated when it was built all around a city? Well, the Vancouver Special is, but that's already talked about. I mean one that long since became an absolute staple of good American urbanism and character? The answer, is the New York brownstones. In "The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn" by Suleiman and Osman, when the brownstones were built, they were dismissed as "products of the mechanical age, modern and artificial, poorly built and subject to decay, with a dehumanizing monotony". The Vancouver Special was a victim of the same complaints (I'm not too sure about the "poorly built and subject to decay part...) and it looks like people are now starting to accept them... just like New Yorkers eventually accepted the brownstone. Tastes in people change, and it is time that tells whether new neighborhoods or refurbished ones end up with a character or not.

The best mass housing has always been simple but attractive buildings that, and this is the key, are flexible. Like mass row-housing when first built are identical, but over the decades and generations all adapt and change to become more distinct. The base building was built in a way that they were flexible, allowed minor additions and changes. One person adds a big bay window on the 2nd floor, someone else makes a retail bump out on the small front yard, someone else changes up the cladding. At the 50 years later you can see they all have the same bones but their own distinct charm.

Much of the housing crisis is a government issue. They did it post war. There is lots of land in Canada. They need the will to do it. But government has too much incentive in it. The government makes a lot on Condos....ie a 800K condo is 160k tax.

We love them because, nostalgia :) I miss the houses covered in broken glass. We used to pick the pieces off as kids!

Another reason Vancouver Specials became so popular was their size fit 33 ft. wide lot size. That's why they look so tight in a row. Construction companies yelled "cha-ching!" and developments went up everywhere in East Vancouver, where I lived...in one of them. They were not pretty, but I recall a childhood neighborhood filled with multicultural middle class families.

Such a racket, go to southeast Asia and build one for 1/10 tenth of the price! better weather too!

a really good way to help the housing crisis is prevent foreign entities from buying your properties. They sit empty because foreigners don't live in them only as investments or store their wealth.

It's off to a slow start but single-family zoning is dying in North America. California's SB 9 legislation means the 'typical' single-family lot is now allowed to become a four-plex. I'm not sure that quadrupling the number of dwelling in a previously single-family home lot is the best plan but it's reality.

These homes remind me of slab houses that were built after WWII for returning soldiers etc., although they are larger. I had never heard of the 'Vancouver Special' until now. Cheers.

i always wondered why it was called the vancouver special... now i know! ty

It’s a well-made clip with colors and music!

"Why cant these poor's just be happy in their tents, away from my neighborhood"- Vancouver

Loved my time in a Vancouver Special

I whole heartedly agree. We need a new affordable special and there are enough planners out there to make a nice one!

Vancouver specials have a special place in my heart.

Very cool as usual

In California we have something similar called dingbats which are small cheaply built apartment complexes which are still relatively affordable to this day.

My apologies for the rambling. This brings back memories, not particularly good ones. I used to rent the ground unit in one of those. The interior had not been modernized (fake wood panelling walls, stucco ceiling, ugly carpeting everywhere except the kitchen, old cupboards...). On the bright side there was a gas fireplace, that sometimes worked, and other times didn't. The house breaker box was in my bedroom and made a constant humming noise. The inner plumping was made up of copper and aluminum components, which started leaking through the ceiling in a few areas due to corrosion. There was carpeting in the bathroom???! The plumbing started leaking there too and the carpet started rotting and the walls falling apart. Fortunately, the bathroom was redone, but on the cheap, and the leaking issue was not addressed because it started leaking again some time after. The owner who lived upstairs, stored open containers of paint thinner and gasoline in the garage, which permeated in my unit. This has nothing to do with the house itself of course, just reminiscing about my 10 years there. One time I parked my car at the rear and forgot to put the handbrake. It rolled down the parkway and smashed into the neighbour's garage door across the alley. Oh and the neighbourhood...One Friday night, at around 5:30pm, my girlfriend at the time was on her way from what used to be a B.C. liquor store on Victoria Drive and she got jumped by two thugs right on 47th. She screamed out for help but nobody came. Horrible place to live, but the rent was cheap (at least at that time) and the unit fairly spacious for one person. The day I walked by what used to be a pizza slice joint next door to the McDonald's, at Victoria and 41st, and saw bullet holes in the window was the day I decided it was time to move. Despite making a pretty decent salary, owning a property in and around Vancouver was just as cost prohibitive as it is today, unless I was willing to live in a shoe box, which I wasn't. In retrospect though I should have bit the bullet. That shoe box would likely be worth today five times the initial price tag. Ah well, maybe in the next game of life.

You're very good and you are doing important work...